Judy Miller Responds To Criticism Of Her Julian Assange Comments

Judy Miller responded to the backlash she received for calling WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange a "bad journalist" during a Fox News show over the weekend.

Miller voiced her criticism on Saturday's "Fox News Watch." She said Assange "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."

Miller was immediately accused of hypocrisy, since she is most famous for writing stories about Iraq's weapons programs that turned out to be false. An old quote of hers was also unearthed, where she said that her job "isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself."

In an email to Yahoo's Cutline blog, Miller defended herself and insisted she was in a different journalistic category than Assange:

"If anybody bothered to read the Iraq war stories they're now so busy criticizing, they would see that Julian Assange and I were involved in very different kinds of journalism. They are not morally equivalent. While we both sought to publicize official secrets, I and my co-authors at The NYT spent enormous time trying to verify the secret government reports and other WMD-related stories we published. Every exclusive story of mine appeared with a discussion of its context, the difficulty involved in corroborating the highly classified information, and an assessment by at least one independent expert and likely skeptic... Julian Assange, whom I have repeatedly defended, did none of these things...I stand by my criticism of this aspect of his work, as well as by my conclusion that he should not be punished or even faulted for trying to ferret out government secrets."